O Death

Samuel L. Jackson and Tommy Lee Jones, on the eve of last week’s première of “The Sunset Limited,” an HBO film written by Cormac McCarthy and directed by Jones, had a drink side by side at the Carlyle Hotel. Jones, who had on a gray suit, blue shirt, necktie decorated with elephants, and tortoiseshell glasses, plays a character named White. Jackson, in a gray sweater over a black turtleneck, blue-rimmed glasses, and a denim cap, plays Black. It’s just the two of them in the film.

They were talking about how “The Sunset Limited” is unusually risky fare for TV: White is a despairing, suicidal college professor who tries to jump in front of a train, and Black is the cheerful, Bible-reading ex-con who saves him.

Scene 1

JONES: It’s a classical dialectic in modern vernacular, beautifully written.

JACKSON: When you sent it to me to read, I said yes immediately.

JONES: Good writing is hard to come by. This one is unique, original.

JACKSON: It’s a lot of fun. Funny.

JONES: We are using the vernacular of Harlem, southern Louisiana, and the Ivy League. Had to create the right atmosphere for very serious ideas about life and death, but with humor.

JACKSON: It’s two guys arguing. About death. We laugh a lot.

JONES: The audience tomorrow night will be filled with very smart people. They will get it, I hope.

JACKSON: I was asked the other day how you make them believe you as the character, and then how you go out of it and back to yourself. Those Method actors talk about becoming the character and staying in it all day and night.

JONES: I don’t want to hear it.

JACKSON: HBO left us alone. Nowadays, when producers go to the big companies with their ideas, they have to try to sell them.

JONES: We brought them something anybody would want. And with a very low budget. We’ll see what the smart audience says.

Scene 2

Jones and Jackson—spruced up in dark suits, and accompanied by a cheery-looking, pink-cheeked Cormac McCarthy, wearing jeans and a tweed jacket—emerge from the Time Warner Center screening of their film. They head for the after party, at the Porter House restaurant, downstairs. They are engulfed by “the smart audience,” their guests expressing acclaim and congratulations. McCarthy says, “I always saw Samuel Jackson in his part when I wrote it.” Marco Beltrami, who scored the film, says, “Tommy wanted concrete noises of the city, the screeching wheels of the subway. Tommy wanted a guy playing a trumpet next door, so I got my ten-year-old son to do it.”

JONES: The projection was very well arranged.

JACKSON: And they laughed in all the right places.

JONES: Plenty of laughs. It made me happy. ♦

Lillian Ross joined the staff of The New Yorker in 1945, during the Second World War, and worked with Harold Ross, the magazine’s founder and first editor.